Homelab: Server Simulator
A realistic sysadmin and homelab simulator where you rack enterprise servers, configure VLANs, manage ZFS storage, balance thermals & power, and triage incidents.
Project overview
Homelab: Server Simulator is an indie simulation and strategy game designed by Vikesh Yadav. It strikes a balance of 70% engaging gameplay and 30% realistic sysadmin concepts. Players design, rack, wire, configure, and maintain real-world computer systems from a single secondhand bedroom mini-PC to multi-rack enterprise colocation datacenters.
Why I built it
Most tycoon and management games treat computer infrastructure as abstract idle timers or generic +5% speed upgrade bars. I wanted to build a game that captures the authentic satisfaction of real technology: slotting heavy servers into rack rails, segmenting subnets with 802.1Q VLANs, recovering from bad disk sectors in RAID-Z2 pools, and executing shell commands in a terminal.
Simulation Engine Architecture
- Physics & Hardware Graph: Models power draw, heat dissipation, CFM airflow, and chassis rail slotting as an interconnected graph.
- Network Stack: Simulates Layer 2 and Layer 3 packet routing, 802.1Q VLAN tagging, DHCP address leasing, and 10GbE SFP+ DAC link saturation.
- Storage Subsystem: Implements ZFS storage pool pools, RAID-Z2 parity calculations, NVMe L2ARC caching, and S.M.A.R.T. disk degradation.
- Interactive Terminal: Built-in shell parser that interprets commands like status, docker ps, zpool status, iperf3, and apcaccess.
- Incident Triage Engine: Dynamic emergency events including drive sector failures, thermal alarm trips, PSU phase dropouts, and cable disconnects.
Thermal & Power Modeling
The engine calculates ambient inlet temperatures versus exhaust plenum temperatures based on CPU TDP wattage and PWM fan RPM curves. Under-powering a chassis or overloading a PDU circuit triggers UPS battery discharge and simulated datacenter blackouts.
What I learned
Building an authentic simulation requires translating intricate technical specifications (such as LACP bonding, ZFS resilver algorithms, and thermal thermodynamics) into intuitive, highly responsive game mechanics without stripping away their genuine engineering depth.